


there is beauty

by kitsunerei88



Series: Revolutionary Arc Plus Extras [8]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Rigel Black Series - murkybluematter
Genre: Character Development, Character Study, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Gen, Introspection, Lawyers, Lawyers Writing Law, Rigel Black Exchange, Rigelverse, The Pureblood Pretense, The Rigel Black Chronicles, The Rigel Black Series, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:55:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23958034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsunerei88/pseuds/kitsunerei88
Summary: “Yeah, why not?” Rigel says, his grey eyes warming at the thought. “Everyone respects lawyers, because they’re terrified of them, and people have to listen to what they say. Your success depends on you, and it doesn’t matter what your personality is like, because if you’re good people will seek you out for advice anyway.”“That could be—yes,” Percy replies, suddenly seeing the image in his mind’s eye. “Attorneys make a good chunk of galleons, too, and as a lawyer I could really help people. The Ministry is bound by the laws of the wizarding world, as they should be, but the lawyers make those laws. I could write the laws that everyone would have to follow!”They aren’t wrong. But, as Percy learns, the world is a little more complicated.
Series: Revolutionary Arc Plus Extras [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722145
Comments: 13
Kudos: 82
Collections: Rigel Black Chronicles Appreciation, Rigel Black Exchange Round 1





	there is beauty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [graveExcitement](https://archiveofourown.org/users/graveExcitement/gifts), [lar_a](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lar_a/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Pureblood Pretense](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/39096) by murkybluematter. 



Percy has always been a little different.

He’s not quite a Weasley, not quite a Gryffindor. He has the same red hair and blue eyes, the same lean and tall and gangly form of father and his brothers Ron and Bill, and he is Sorted into Gryffindor just like the rest of his family.

But that’s where the similarities end. At home, he walks just a little out of step of his family. He likes his books alphabetized by subject and author on his shelf, his quills sorted by size and shape and colour, his class notes sorted by year and date and class. He likes his bed to be neatly made every morning, he likes three slices of toast with marmalade with orange juice for breakfast, and he likes to know where he’ll be not just for that day, but the rest of the week. He likes order—order, and structure, and predictability _._

He’s studious. He cares about his grades; more than anyone else in his year in Gryffindor, more than his brothers, more than anyone else he knows. Nothing but Outstandings will do, and the first time he gets an “Exceeds Expectations”, he pulls the curtains on his four-poster and cries. It isn’t so much that he’s the only one who cares about his marks, because he knows that others do, but Percy is the only one who doesn’t try to hide it.

Percy isn’t cool. He isn’t fun, the way his brothers are—he isn’t outgoing, he isn’t extroverted, and while he wants attention as much as any other person does, he doesn’t want it to be for the same things that his brothers want. He isn’t drawn to adventure, the way that Bill is, nor to danger, the way that Charlie is. He isn’t a prankster like the Twins, and indeed he finds pranks to be stressful and not even the least bit fun, partly because he is always on the butt end of them. He doesn’t have the charming awkward friendliness that Ron employs, nor Ginny’s compelling confidence.

He isn’t sure he is even brave. The Sorting Hat puts him into Gryffindor, but it’s with a casual air—Percival Ignatius Weasley is a Weasley, and therefore he is a Gryffindor. Percy is red hair and Weasley and therefore he must be courageous, and yet he isn’t sure he’s done a single courageous thing in his entire life. Percy isn’t even courageous enough to argue with the Hat, to suggest that really, maybe Ravenclaw might be better. Ravenclaw, or even Hufflepuff.

Percy is dour, he is stiff, he is the antithesis of fun. He is a rule-follower, not a rule-breaker; he is the one who interrupts and stops pranks, rather than playing them. He has nothing that he is passionate about, not like Charlie or the twins, and the very idea of heading for a thrill-fueled career fills him with anxiety.

It could be cause, or it could be effect, but Percy is also the Weasley who cares most about respect. He wants it, craves respect the way that an alcoholic craves a drink. He wants to be respected, and he loves his family dearly and he wants them to be more. He wants their name to garner the respect of the Longbottoms, if not the Potters or the Malfoys; he wants their name to mean more than poor, more than blood traitor, more than red hair and too many children.

It’s that which draws him first towards the Ministry—his desire for respect and recognition, not just for himself but for his family. And when Rigel points out that perhaps the Ministry is a place where he won’t be able to get ahead because of his name, because he lacks influence, and that perhaps going to the Ministry is not the path to respectability, Percy doesn’t find it that hard to switch his ambitions to law.

* * *

“Law?” Mum bustles around the tiny, warm kitchen at the Burrow, cleaning up from breakfast. It’s summer, and his many siblings are out playing a pick-up game of Quidditch, giving Percy a rare few minutes alone with his mother. “I wouldn’t have thought that would be a path that would interest you—it’s a hard one to walk.”

Percy pauses, halfway through his orange juice. “Is it?”

Mum doesn’t say anything for a few minutes, using her wand to cast a charm to set the dishes to washing themselves and stacking themselves on her dish rack. Percy thinks she’s also using the time to sort her words.

“It’s not a field anyone in our family has gone into,” she says finally. “Not the Weasleys, nor the Prewetts. I wonder if you might do better at the Ministry—even if your father isn’t in a very high position, he can still help you, show you the ropes.”

Percy tenses. “I don’t need someone to smooth my path, Mum. I—I’d rather _not_ have someone smoothing my path.”

“Hmm.” Mum sends him a searching look. “I’m not trying to stop you, and I don’t know the first thing about law. But a Ministry job is secure, no matter what position it is, and I’m not so sure that law is. You care a lot about security, dear.”

“We all start somewhere,” Percy says with a slight frown, not sure how else to respond. “And I think I will do better in law than I would in the Ministry.”

Mum nods and changes the subject.

* * *

He doesn’t need to change his classes, not really. Hogwarts is fundamentally a magical school, and they don’t offer many non-magical subjects. There is really only the International Relations class and the Wizarding Languages class, but for law Percy only needs the International Relations. The accepted training for law is a ten-month articling[1] term at the Ministry or a law firm, working under an accomplished lawyer, alongside a part-time bar admission course operated by the Inns of Court.

But in order to enroll in the course, the Professional Legal Training Course or the PLTC, Percy needs a principal: a practicing barrister and solicitor to sponsor him and agree to supervise him through his articles, teaching him along the way. The biggest firms, from the Ministry of Magic’s Department of Justice to major full-service firms[2] like Walker Parkinson, Bradley Head or Marchbanks Fletcher Boot, can take two or three articling students at a time; others, small firms like Whitlock Greene or Chase Campbell Davies, maybe only one.

He’s Head Boy at Hogwarts, he’s been a prefect for three years, and he has top grades. It shouldn’t be hard for him to get articles, and he sends out a half-dozen applications to the Ministry and to the biggest and most prestigious law firms.

Four call him into interviews.

The morning of the interviews, he stands in his dorm room, thankfully empty for the moment. It’s Saturday, a Hogsmeade weekend, so all the interviews have been scheduled for today in the private back room of the Three Broomsticks. Four interviews, all of them a half-hour long, with two lawyers each.

This is Interview Weekend—the two days over which most firms consider this year’s offerings, decide which students to supervise for a year and to sponsor for admission to the bar. Today is the make or break day for most who want a career in law, because if he doesn’t get an offer today, there are preciously few firms that will take him on.

The firms that aren’t hiring today aren’t the ones that Percy wants to work for anyway. They’re all small firms, mainly criminal defence, not prestigious, and Percy doesn’t want to be a barrister. He wants to write the laws that everyone, including the government, needs to follow; he wants to provide advice to people trying to work through the law, not defend criminals.

The four interviews he has are good ones. The Ministry’s Department of Justice has called, which he knows is the one that Mum would want him to take, if he can, and the one which Percy wants the most. First, it’s a lawyer position in the Ministry where he always wanted to be; second, if it’s the Ministry, he has the most chance of drafting new laws. The other three firms are all full-service, with large business client portfolios. If he gets a choice, he thinks he would pick the Ministry first, then any of the others.

He’s pale in his mirror, his freckles standing out starkly on his face. His blue eyes are sharp, and his hair is neatly combed and brushed. He fingers the threadbare hems of his dress robes—the light grey makes his skin look sallow and sickly, but at least there are no patches or fraying threads. It’s obviously second-hand, both from the cut of the robes and the wear, but there is little he can do about that. His family doesn’t have money for new robes for any of them, and it could be worse.

He has the grades, and he has the position at Hogwarts, so he doesn’t worry too much about it. This is law, and if there is any profession where his antecedents shouldn’t matter, then this is it. Law is about justice, about merit; people will seek him out because he’s good at his job, not his background or his personality.

With that in mind, he follows his classmates to Hogsmeade, to the Three Broomsticks. He recognizes the ones interviewing at a glance; they’re the ones who are dressed in their best robes, in black and navy blue and dark grey, the ones that look too awake and too perky and too enthusiastic. Penelope Clearwater is there, as is Darren Corner, Michael Phipps, and Priscilla Carmichael, all in his year and silently spread across two booths. Two Ravenclaws, a Hufflepuff, and a Slytherin.

He glances between the two of them, but of this group, he gets along best with Penny, his ex-girlfriend, the Head Girl and a Ravenclaw prefect, so he slides into the booth she’s sharing with a fidgeting Darren Corner. “Do you mind if I sit here?”

She shakes her head, her blue eyes fixed on the parchment in front of her. Her curriculum vitae, Percy realizes after a glance, with her cover letter. He thinks for a moment and decides to leave it alone.

“Where are you interviewing?” he asks Corner, Penny’s fellow Ravenclaw, trying to be friendly.

Corner looks at him oddly, then glances down at Percy’s robes with a slight, confused, twitch of his eyebrows. He doesn’t say anything, though Percy tenses slightly at the look, and his reply is calm, quiet. “Turpin Yorke and Marchbanks Fletcher Boot,” he says easily. “You?”

“The Ministry, Norris McDonald Wilson, Bradley Head and Marchbanks Fletcher Boot,” Percy reels off, internally swelling with pride at his four interviews. There aren’t many top-tier firms in Wizarding Britain, and Percy has landed interviews at three of them. Four interviews, too, give him better odds—he only needs to succeed in one.

Corner nods. “Large international business practices at all of them. Are you hoping to work on international trade law?”

“They’re full-service, aren’t they?” Percy tilts his head thoughtfully. “I was actually looking to provide more domestic services—I’m hoping for the Ministry, for legislative drafting.”

Corner’s eyes sharpen, and he exchanges a look with Penny, who only shakes her head very slightly. Percy frowns, feeling like he missed something, but a bell rings from the back of the room.

“That’s me,” Corner says quickly, rising from his seat. “Good luck, Weasley. With four interviews, I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

“Thank you,” Percy replies, smiling slightly. “To you, too.”

Without Corner, he turns to Penny, who is still studying her application materials as if she can burn the contents into her brain. He hesitates, but exes or not, he knows Penny well enough, so he goes ahead and asks. “Did I say something wrong?”

“Hmm?” She looks up at him, tucking a strand of long, blonde hair behind her ear. “No, not at all. I’m sorry, I didn’t really sleep last night, and I really need to review these materials. I only have the one interview with the Ministry, so—do you mind?”

“No,” Percy replies, smiling down at her. If he only had one interview, he thinks he would be stressed too. “Good luck, Penny.”

His interviews are fine. The Ministry interview is, he thinks, his best one—they ask all the usual questions, about why he wants to become a lawyer, what skills he thinks he brings to the position, and questions that pry at how well he can prioritize work, how he approaches research, and how he handles conflict. The other three are, he thinks, decidedly odd.

At the interview with Norris McDonald Wilson, they ask him about his Quidditch team. He, a little flummoxed, answers the Chudley Cannons, Ron’s favourite team. Percy has never loved Quidditch, not the way his brothers love it, and when they ask why he loves the Chudley Cannons over better ranking teams like the Tutshill Tornadoes or the Holyhead Harpies, he makes up something about their good sportsmanship, spirit and perseverance. The Chudley Cannons haven’t won a game in almost a century.

Believe it or not, Norris McDonald Wilson goes better than Marchbanks Fletcher Boot, who ask him what books he’s read recently. Percy blinks, fumbling for the title—it’s a Transfiguration book, recommended to him by Professor McGonagall. When they ask him why, he only says that he likes Transfiguration, he’s always been interested in the technical difficulty of it, and he struggles dragging the conversation out for the next twenty-five minutes.

The absolute worst interview, though, is Bradley Head, where they ask him about his travels. Percy has put “travel” on his list of interests, required on every curriculum vitae for law firms, but in truth that interest is more _aspirational_ than it is truth. He spins at length about his family’s recent vacation to Egypt, even though he hated the sun, he hated the heat, and he hated the sand. The sand had gotten absolutely everywhere.

He comes out of it, less sure of himself than when he went in, but they all say they’ll let him know in a few days and he _does_ have four chances and one offer is all he needs.

* * *

He doesn’t have one offer. He receives four very polite owls a week later, all of them thanking him for the interview and advising that they had many good applicants, and they were sorry to say that they would not be extending him an offer at this time.

 _At this time_. It is a lie, stark on the page, and Percy calmly folds each of the letters, tears them into exact, half-inch squares, and throws them in the fire.

Interview Weekend was it. With Interview Weekend behind him, and four interviews with no result, Percy is lost. Worse, he is humiliated.

Darren Corner wins a spot with Marchbanks Fletcher Boot; Penny is at the Ministry. Priscilla Carmichael ends up at Turpin Yorke, while Michael Phipps accepts a position at Walker Parkinson. Outside the mere four that he saw at the Three Broomsticks, he hears about Allison McAllister, a Hufflepuff, who accepts an offer from Bradley Head, and Jason Reed, another Ravenclaw, goes to Norris McDonald Wilson. Everyone, it seems, has gotten a position—everyone except for him.

He doesn’t know why. He’s the top candidate—by every _objective_ measure, Percy should be the top pick. He’s a prefect, he’s the _Head Boy_ , his grades are a straight line of “O”s. He should have been with them, with the top of them, and he has no idea why he isn’t. And, with four interviews to prepare for, Percy has missed the deadline to apply in the general Ministry recruitment. It’s too late, now, to fall back on a Ministry position. He doesn’t know how to explain this, to tell anyone this—he had _four_ interviews, and somehow, he failed them all.

He plays them over and over again in his mind. The Ministry is easily the worst one—it’s the interview he _prepared_ for, and he has good answers to all their standard questions. He knows why he wants to be a lawyer, and he knows why he wants to work for the Ministry. He wants to write law. He’s the Head Boy at Hogwarts, and while he isn’t what anyone would call _well-liked_ , he performs his responsibilities well. He has a dozen examples of how he can prioritize work, and his grades show that he can research with the best of them. He has brothers, and they’re all so different from him, and he has learned through many years how to manage conflict.

And it isn’t enough. It isn’t enough, and Percy doesn’t even understand the other three interviews. They didn’t even ask him anything relevant—nothing about his skills, or his strengths, or his weaknesses. Instead, they asked him about sports, his hobbies, his interests. What do those have to do with law?

He’s stewing, sitting across the table from Penny as they sort through the week’s disciplinary reports. The way in which he looks at the papers, skimming them before tossing them aside, must attract her notice.

“Stop,” she snaps, putting her own pile of records down. “Percy, stop. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Percy mutters, tossing aside another report for his brothers. The twins were going to be the death of him. “Nothing at bloody all.”

“That’s a lie,” she snorts. “It’s the interviews, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t take a Ravenclaw to see that you didn’t get an offer.” Penny crosses her arms over her chest. “We might as well talk about, get it out before you take hundred points off some poor sod and throw your brothers into a month’s worth of detentions. What happened?”

Percy sets the last report down, his mouth twisting in angry disappointment. “I don’t know. I had four interviews. _Four_. The Ministry one went fine, but the other three… They didn’t ask me anything about my skills or about being a lawyer at all. Questions about Quidditch, and books, and travel. How is that relevant? And because I was interviewing at the firms, I didn’t apply in the general Ministry recruitment, and now the entirety of next year is just—a black hole. What do I do now?”

“There are a lot of firms that accept articling students outside Interview Weekend, you know,” Penny says dryly. “Most people who don’t get offers in the main recruitment apply to them. Some people even skip the main recruitment to apply to them.”

“ _Defence_ firms,” Percy snaps back. “I don’t want to be a criminal defence lawyer. I don’t even want to be a barrister—I want to write the laws that the government needs to follow, I want to make a difference. I want to help people.”

“And you think criminal defence lawyers don’t help people?” Penny leans back, her eyebrows rising.

“Of course, they do,” Percy replies, shaking his head. “But it’s not—I would have a hard time defending criminals. How could I defend someone if I knew they had committed the crime?”

Penny’s eyebrows go even higher. Even if they had dated last year and worked together as prefects and as Head Boy and Girl outside of that, they’ve never really discussed the details of their shared ambitions. They both wanted to be lawyers, and they shared their study notes, they shared their information on specific firms, they shared their lists of applications. But they never shared the whys—it was always enough, for both of them, that they wanted to be lawyers.

“It’s an adversarial system, Percy,” she says eventually, her voice silk and steel all at once. “Part of the way our legal system functions is that the state should not be able to wantonly imprison people, and the accused is entitled to a full defence. Criminal defence lawyers play a very important role.”

“But I don’t have to play that role.” Percy looks away. “I just don’t think it’s for me, Penny. It’s not—not really what I’m interested in.”

“Would you have written laws that you vehemently disagreed with at the Ministry, then?” Penny’s blue eyes are sharp, critical. “Laws that hurt people, laws that stripped people of their rights?”

“What?” Percy pauses. “No, of course not—I want to _help_ people.”

“You applied to the Ministry and to the five largest, most prestigious full-service law firms in the country,” Penny retorts, shaking her head in annoyance, beginning to pack up her things. “What do you think a job is at the Ministry is? What did you think you’d be doing? You don’t seem to have thought this through very well.”

“Wait, where do you think you’re going?” Percy asks, watching as she puts away her quill and ink. “We’re not done with the disciplinary reports—”

“I’ll finish it in Ravenclaw Tower,” she says, picking up her sheaf of reports. “I have all the Ravenclaw and Slytherin reports and I’ll deal with those Houses. But while you’re listening, I might as well tell you this: you need new robes for interviews. Professional legal dress is black, navy blue, and nothing lighter than charcoal until you make partner or senior counsel[3].”

Percy’s jaw drops. “But this is _law!_ I can’t afford new dress robes, and with my marks—”

“What, because it’s law, it’s perfectly meritorious?” Penny rolls her eyes, annoyed, standing up. “You probably got an interview from the Ministry because of your marks, yes, but your interviews at Norris McDonald Wilson, Marchbanks Fletcher Boot and Bradley Head were at least partly because you’re from a prominent pureblood family that doesn’t hold with pureblood supremacy. They already know you’re smart, so they were asking you questions to see how open-minded you were and how well they could throw you in with their American business clients. The ideal answers would have been to segue into Quodpot or football, to talk about a Muggle book you’d read recently, and to talk about your excitement and enthusiasm for other cultures.”

Percy stares at her, open-mouthed in mixed surprise and hurt. She sighs, looking away—whatever she says, they know each other well enough that she can read his expressions easier than most.

“I’m sorry, Percy,” she says, and he knows that as annoyed as she is, she really is sorry for going off on him. “It’s just that—there was a party in Ravenclaw Tower last night, and I’m a bit hungover. I’ll take care of the Ravenclaws and Slytherins, so don’t worry about them.”

She turns to go, heading to the door leading to the rest of the castle, and after a beat Percy’s tongue unfreezes.

“Wait.” He takes a deep breath. “Would you write laws that hurt people? That strip people of their rights?”

She turns around, and her words are serious. “Yes. If that’s what I’m asked to do, despite my advice otherwise, then yes.”

“But why?”

“Because it’s the role of the Wizengamot to decide the legislative priorities, just as it’s the Wizengamot that votes the new law in. Because if not me, someone else would do it, and because I happen to enjoy a challenge.” Penny shrugs, and Percy has the strong sense that there’s something she isn’t telling him. “Because I like to find ways to reason and argue about problems, and I don’t need to personally agree with my own arguments to make them for other people. Does that make sense?”

“I—I see.” Percy nods, as if it does make sense, but it doesn’t. Not to him, not really. “Thank you. I’ll see you—see you later.”

* * *

It takes him a week to decide to send out applications to a new set of firms. He gets the names from Susan Bones, a Hufflepuff in Ron’s year: Adams Hicks, Bones Goldstein, Provenzano & Associates, Reggi Law, Rosen & Associates. There aren’t many defence firms—the vast majority of criminal defence lawyers are sole practitioners, setting up their own shingle, and there’s no prestige in it. But Percy only needs a principal[4], and no one ever said that he needed to stay in criminal defence forever. He just needs to be called to the bar, and he can figure out the rest later.

He doesn’t really want to be applying to the criminal defence firms. They pay a third of what the major law firms or the Ministry pays, and it’s nothing that he can show off to anyone, but he can’t bear to admit that he tried something and failed. So, he pivots, spends some time writing short, succinct cover letters about the importance of criminal defence lawyers for the proper functioning of the legal system, and sends them off.

No one in his family is a lawyer, so he can always pretend like these firms are every bit as prestigious as the ones that rejected him. And Bones Goldstein does occupy a certain cachet—about third of the Bones are eventually appointed to the bench[5], some of whom are certainly from the defence. It’s only ten years of practice before he can be considered for the bench, if he doesn’t manage to switch into another, better firm before then.

He gets only one interview, which Susan says is quite normal, even impressive—criminal defence, she says, traditionally picks their students from OWL year, and takes them on for two summers before agreeing to articles.

They’re pickier, these firms, which doesn’t make any sense to Percy. They’re small firms, only a handful of lawyers each, and the amount they pay their students is pitiful. They have almost no profile outside the legal profession. But one interview is all he needs, because one offer is all he needs, and he throws himself into studying and preparing for this _one_ interview.

He learns the lines that are expected. Why does he want to work criminal defence? Because of what Penny said, that the adversarial system only works if the accused has a full and complete defence, and that means the best lawyers. He finds a reason why he came to law late, because he doesn’t have any role models in his life to lead him on this path, and he makes sure to replace the word “criminal” in his vocabulary with “accused”. It’s good, and he hopes that between his lines and his background, it’s good enough for Bones Goldstein to take him on.

The morning of this interview, he charms his dress robes black. It’s still obviously an older robe, not cut in the most modern fashion, but it’s better than in the first round. He has a permission slip to leave Hogwarts and miss his classes for the afternoon, and he packs his preparation materials into a briefcase, stiffens his spine, and heads out of the castle to the front gates.

Bones Goldstein is in an old building, several streets off Diagon Alley. The alley it’s on is a dead end, so small that it doesn’t even have a name, and he takes three wrong turns before he finds it: a tall, three-storey, redbrick building, more like a home than an office. It looks completely non-descript, one building in a residential area with a funeral home next door. Only a small gold plaque at the entrance, reading _Bones Goldstein Barristers_ in black ink, sets the building apart from the others.

Percy hesitates for a moment, examining the ivy climbing the walls, the brightly lit windows, before he sighs and climbs the steps. Eight steps up to the landing, and he stands before a heavy, oversized door painted in black. A plain gold ring hangs in the centre, on a burnished golden backing, and Percy lifts it and drops it with a bang.

“Come on in,” a warm, matronly voice says from somewhere above his head, and there’s a soft buzz as the door unlocks. Percy walks into a worn reception room—there are only four seats in front of the reception desk, where a woman with iron-grey hair curled in rings is sorting correspondence. There are a dozen quills on the desk, some half of them broken and spilling ink on spare pieces of parchment. She glances at him, and nods to the faded chairs in the reception. “Percival Weasley, right? Have a seat. I’ll call Lizzie.” She reaches over and, without a wand, hits one of the squares of paper lining the wall beside her. Each of them has a rune and a name on it, clearly some kind of alert spell.

Percy sits, and waits, and he examines the room around him. It’s not what he pictures when he thinks of an office—there are some aspects that are like an office, like the desk with the receptionist, but the rest of it looks homey, too homey to be a legal office. The fabric of the chair is shiny from how many people have sat in them, and they’re smaller than comfortable. He feels pinched, too tall and gangly for this space, though there’s nothing about this space that says he should feel like that. Maybe it’s that he is looking for elegance, he is looking for the beauty that comes with power and prestige, and instead everything is clearly designed to put this firm’s clients at ease.

“Send him up,” a woman replies, the speaking spell appearing in the air beside the receptionist. She looks up, smiles, hands him a keychain with the scales of justice and gestures to a wooden door set just before her desk.

“You heard her. Go on up, dear—first floor, she’ll meet you. Return the token when you come back; it just lets you past the usual wards.”

Percy nods, thanking her, and heads upstairs.

The stairs are wood, covered in carpet that was once red, but was now a faded pink. The barristers are dark, too smooth from years of use, and the few cracks or blemishes have been worn away into rivers and streams. The walls are lined with portraits, the past and present partners of Bones Goldstein, who watch him in silent consideration or interest as he treads upstairs.

On the landing, he’s met by a petite woman of middle age. Her hair is darker than he suspects it should be, cut short and combed over to sweep dramatically to the left while leaving her face clear. Her eyebrows are plucked to thin, sharp arches, and her brown eyes are lined in thick black kohl. Her lips are painted red, her nails long, filed, and dark blue. 

Elizabeth Bones, Percy recalls. Lady Amelia Bones’ younger sister, one who hasn’t been yet appointed to the bench—the less successful one. But she carries herself with confidence, like a woman who knows perfectly well who she is and what she wants. She’s somebody so completely outside of his experience, and Percy is, for a moment, taken aback.

Grown women in his life do not look like this. They look like his mother, no-nonsense and business-like as they take care of their families, or they look like Professor McGonagall, who is elderly and stern and professional. They don’t wear makeup, they put their hair up and out of the way and roll up their sleeves while they get things done. Women who care about their appearance, like this woman so clearly does, are what Percy has learned to associate with empty-headed ninnies who don’t think much beyond boys and clothes and makeup. Women who look like this giggle and preen, they don’t lead the way to their pristine corner offices with the faint clicking of their sharp, stiletto heels, their pressed navy-blue robes swinging.

“Have a seat,” she says, opening a cabinet to one side and pulling out a bottle and two glasses. “Scotch?”

“No, thank you,” Percy replies primly, settling into the chair across from the desk. The woman shrugs, pours herself a finger, and sits down to examine him with interest.

Percy feels like a bug pinned on card. She doesn’t say anything at first, just watching him and examining him: his bright red hair, his freckles dark on his pale skin, his round, horn-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. Her eyes linger for a moment on his robes, and Percy sees that she notices the cut, the worn edges on his hems, the fact that it’s about two inches too short for him. He tenses for a moment, but she doesn’t comment on it.

“So,” she drawls, raising her glass for a sip. “Why do you want to article at Bones Goldstein?”

“Bones Goldstein is a leading criminal defence firm,” Percy starts, reeling off his carefully prepared and memorized answer. “I’m interested in exploring a career in criminal defence, and Bones Goldstein would be an ideal place for me to learn the basics. Criminal defence is appealing to me because of the critical role that criminal defence plays in our legal system. It is important that the government have checks on its power, and criminal defence work is one of those key checks—”

“Oh, cut the shit, Weasley.” The woman rolls her eyes, leaning back in her chair. “I don’t need a regurgitated oral dissertation on how great we are. Lawyers talk. I know you’re here because you got rejected from the Ministry and five of the top corporate-commercial firms in the country, and I know that you don’t have a passion for criminal defence. Normally, I’d take one look at someone like you and throw your application in the rejection pile. You don’t give a shit about criminal defence work, because if you did, you’d have been here two years ago. But for some reason, you’re here. Top grades, Head Boy. A Weasley—not noble, but Sacred Twenty-Eight. You can walk into any mid-level job at the Ministry, and even if there’s not much room for advancement, that’s still more than most can get. But you’re here, at a criminal defence firm. Why?”

Percy gapes for a moment, trying to find an answer. This isn’t in the plans—he has the background, he has the grades, he’s done everything right. He is supposed to have a job at one of the big firms or with the Ministry, but instead, he is here.

“Because I want to help people,” he tries again, but she shakes her head.

“If you wanted to help people, you’d become a Healer,” Bones says diffidently, taking another sip of scotch. “But you’re here, in a small criminal defence firm. I want to know why, and try the truth, this time.”

Percy falls silent, glaring at this witch who is too beautiful to be smart, who cares too much about how she looks to be competent. Her hands are clasped around her glass, her elbows are resting on the table, and her eyes bore into him, intrigued, like he’s a puzzle that she’s trying to solve.

“Because I want to be respected,” he spills out, annoyed, his gaze fixed on her well-manicured nails. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. “Because I want people to listen to me. Because I want to earn money, and I want my family to be respected. I want the Weasley name to have the same respect as the Bones, or to mean something more than being poor and having too many children and red hair. Because I want to go into a job where I can advance based on my merit, and not the influence that my family doesn’t wield.”

He takes a deep breath, horrified at himself—he can’t believe he lost control so easily, especially to this woman who is too well put together, with too much makeup and too much prepossession. But this interview is clearly going badly already anyway, and he has nothing to lose. His words, when he continues, are hard. “And I _do_ want to hold the government in check, I want to write the laws that the government needs to follow. I _do_ want to help people. I just didn’t think I’d be doing it _here_.”

The woman stares at him, pausing in with the glass halfway to her lips, and interest flits across her face. “Huh. Now we’re getting somewhere. So—what do you do for fun?”

“Why does everyone insist on asking these questions?” Percy snaps, his hands flying sharply in the air. “What does it matter what I do for fun? I’m the Head Boy, I’m a _Gryffindor_ prefect, I have five brothers and a sister—what do you think I do for fun? I fight off my brothers from wrecking my organizational schemes and getting into my things, I stop students from killing themselves and each other by accident, and then I do my homework. I don’t have much time for other things.”

“Maybe you should find something.” The woman smiles, setting her glass down. “And we ask because, with your grades and record, we know that you can do the job. We just want to know whether we’ll want to kill you or not while you do it.”

* * *

Percy is sure that he failed the interview—this one worse than the rest. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Bones had him marked as a liar within the first five minutes, and the rest of the interview is just barb after barb. She wrings out of him that he loves his family, but that they often drive him up the wall; that he hasn’t read for pleasure in more than three years; that he desperately wants recognition and that even becoming Head Boy isn’t enough. He’s sure that none of it spells an articling position for him, and yet…

Three weeks later, Elizabeth Bones writes him with a formal offer for articles, and their articling agreement is signed, sealed and delivered shortly afterwards. It’s not the job that he wanted, but it’s a job, and it’s an articling principal, and he never has to admit to his family that this wasn’t in the plans. Bones Goldstein is a good firm, if defence-side, and he just tells his family that he’s at a major firm specializing in Ministry cases.

It’s true, after a fashion. Criminal defence is a specialization in Ministry cases, and if his family takes it to mean something else, then that is their assumption.

He signs up for the PLTC, his articling agreement in hand, and the week after his graduation from Hogwarts he goes to the Inns of Court and picks up eight massive volumes of materials which cost too much and for which his firm pays. PLTC is for the most part self-studied, though there are eight mandatory lectures to attend, one per subject, and eight exams to pass. He runs into Penny outside the Inns of Court, stacking her books.

“You got articles, then?” Penny says, a small frown on her face as she charms the books to fit into a bag that she brought for that explicit purpose. “Congratulations.”

“Bones Goldstein.” Percy smiles, pretending to more enthusiasm than he actually feels. A firm is a firm, and it’s just one year.

“Good firm.” Penny nods, a little absent-minded, as she just manages to shove the last volume into her bag. “When do you start?”

“Monday,” Percy says. Most of the year’s articled students begin at the same time, in order to meet the ten-month requirement before the May Call to the Bar[6] next year. The timelines are tight enough, and it’s better to start early in case something comes up. “You?”

“Same.” She swings her bag over her shoulder. “I’ll see you at PLTC, then.”

“See you.”

He has a new wardrobe—a graduation gift from his parents, and he carefully ensures that every single one is a shade of black, navy-blue, or charcoal-grey. His mother despairs at his lack of colour, suggesting several robes in a lighter blue that she says will bring out his eyes, but he steadfastly refuses. He can’t wear lighter colours for work, and he has precious few enough robes that he can’t afford the luxury of robes that he cannot wear to work.

It’s in a brand new, charcoal-grey robe that he goes to Bones Goldstein on his first day and meets Audrey Smith.

She’s in the articling students’ office: a small room at the back of the second floor. A wall of books lines the back wall, with two desks spaced at opposite sides of the room. There’s just enough room that they won’t fall into each other when they lean back in their desk chairs, but little more than that. Her brown hair is layered to frame her round face, with a fringe over her forehead. She has light freckles dusting her pert nose, and her robes are cut to highlight soft, round curves. She’s busy setting up a new set of Muggle-style pens and pads of paper at her station, alongside a few quills and precious little parchment.

“You must be the other student,” she says, turning to him, letting a warm smile come across her face and holding out a hand. Her accent is British, but Percy doesn’t recognize her. “My name is Audrey—Audrey Smith. I guess we’ll be getting cozy for the next ten months.”

“Percy Weasley,” Percy replies slowly, taking her hand and trying to place her. He should know everyone at Hogwarts, and he doesn’t recognize her. “Er—”

“I went to Ilvermorny in America,” Audrey explains with a casual wave of her hand. “I’m a halfblood.”

Percy pauses, blinking. “Oh.”

“That going to be a problem for you?” She’s still smiling, and her voice is still warm and light, but there’s a challenge in her hazel eyes.

“No, not at all,” Percy says quickly, and it isn’t a problem. He is just taken aback because he hasn’t met many halfbloods before. Rigel Black once brought his halfblood cousin, Harry Potter, over to the Burrow, but she’s only one person. He didn’t think that most people who were educated abroad returned to Britain. “So—er, first day?”

“In a way,” she says, relaxing and turning back to her desk. “First day of articles, but I’ve been here the last two summers. Richard asked that I show you the ropes of set-date court, client interviews, and so on.”

“Richard?” Percy frowns.

“Richard Goldstein?” Audrey raises an eyebrow at him. “You should learn the names of the partners in the firm, at least.”

“Of course, I’ve learned the names of the partners,” Percy retorts, shaking his head. “I was simply curious that you were on first name terms?”

Audrey tilts her head up—Percy is a good eight inches taller than she is, at least, and while she’s dressed in neat, navy-blue robes, he can see that she’s kicked her heels off and that they’re lying in a jumble beside her desk. “Why, is that weird? Seems pretty normal to me.”

“I would have thought that, in the legal profession, we required more formality,” Percy says stiffly, trying to put his feelings into words. The woman doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with using first names, even to her superiors, and it all strikes him as being rather strange, even uncomfortable.

She shrugs. “Well, I mean—we’ll be getting very familiar over the next ten months. You’ll see. Anyway, we can’t meet clients in our office because of confidentiality, so I’m officially calling this a no-shoes zone. My heels are going to kill me. Want to go for an office tour?”

Percy hesitates, then he sets down his own briefcase holding all the things he wanted to have near him at the office. “Yes, why not?”

Audrey shows him first around the second floor first, which, aside from the articling students’ office, boasts a large sitting area with two sofas and an armchair. The walls are lined with more books, and the room has the slightly stale air of being unused—or, at least, not used for its apparent purpose. He spots a pile of blankets piled at the end of one sofa and has the strong impression that this is a room that lawyers might sleep in after a long night.

“The couches aren’t bad for one night,” Audrey confirms for him. “But the crick they’ll give in your neck is killer.”

There’s also a bathroom attached to the room, one which has a shower that looks like it hasn’t been used or cleaned in months. Audrey shows it to him with a perfunctory air and pretends not to see when Percy wrinkles his nose and discreetly casts a cleaning spell.

There is also a large boardroom, dominated by a huge, battered wooden table stacked with volume after volume of books and strewn with pads of blue-lined, yellow paper. The chairs around the boardroom are mismatched, but there are diagrams and charts all over the place. Percy thinks he might recognize several magical theory textbooks specializing in defensive magic. In the centre of the mess, a man in black dress robes with a heavy frown on his face is flipping through page after page of notes.

“Another self-defence case, Steve?” Audrey asks, looking around the room.

“Audrey,” the man replies, looking up to reveal a broad, hooked nose, narrow chin and dark eyes. “Welcome back. You finished the Defense Mastery, right?”

“Sure did,” Audrey replies easily, and Percy shoots her a puzzled look. “Oh, Steve, this is Percy, the other student for the year. I’m showing him around.”

“Lizzie’s curiosity?” The lawyer looks at Percy for a moment, thoughtful, then holds out his hand to shake. “Welcome to Bones Goldstein. Stefan Basciano, at your service. Audrey, when you’re done showing him around, come back here, would you? I want to pick your brain on the theory of this case.”

“Will do,” Audrey says, turning around and ushering Percy out of the boardroom and shutting the door behind her. “The boardroom is an internal meeting room only, so every time someone is on a major case, they kind of take it over for the space. Come on, let’s go downstairs. You know Lizzie already, of course, but everyone else.”

“Defense Mastery?” Percy asks, looking down at the woman walking beside him in heels. Even in heels, she’s half a foot shorter than him. “I thought you just graduated?”

“The American schools offer wider programs.” Audrey shrugs, leading the way to the front stairwell. “Most of us finish with a specialization or Mastery of some kind, mine just happens to be in Defense. Because of Steve, actually—he’s our self-defence specialist, and he recommended I get it. You pick up more in self-defence and voluntariness cases when you have a deeper understanding of the magic behind it.”

The first floor is devoted to the lawyers and their offices. Bones Goldstein is a small firm, with only five lawyers. Aside from the partners, Elizabeth Bones and Richard Goldstein, there are three associates. Stefan, Percy has already met upstairs, but he waves hello to a woman with almost white-blond hair and a round face named Katherine Wright, who waves at him distractedly from her Floo call, and Audrey explains that the third associate, Bertrand Belanger, is running set date court for their clients this morning.

“That’ll become our responsibility,” Audrey says. “Don’t worry, it’s easy. Mostly it’s yelling at the Ministry that they haven’t provided us with adequate disclosure, pointing out problems or obvious holes in their cases, and so on. It’s not all murder trials, mostly it’s negotiating with the Ministry on plea bargains and so on.”

On the ground floor, Percy is shown to the three client meeting rooms, small and clean and private, and the kitchen, and the filing room. Audrey introduces him to Martha, their long-serving and long-suffering receptionist and law clerk and he is told in the strictest of terms to stay on her good side. Martha, he is advised, can do a lot to make his life easier or harder, beginning with keeping track of his clients and ending with losing his files.

“And remember,” Audrey says, her face turning serious in the kitchen, as she turns and begins setting up a complicated charm to brew coffee. “Martha is also the first line of defense if you get in trouble down here. This is never an easy conversation, not least because saying that our clients might be dangerous feeds into a lot of stereotypes about poverty. But we do see a lot of people on their worst days imaginable, and you should always be taking basic precautions. When you get into a client room with a client, always seat yourself closer to the door. If you ever feel like you’re in danger, get out and get past the line made by Martha’s desk against the wall, or into either of the stairwells—you need to be carrying a ward-key to get past them. Get Steve or Bert, or me. We all have Defense Masteries, so we can handle ourselves, and Lizzie is mean with a wand.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Percy replies, watching her pale wand move in a spell he hasn’t seen before. “Though I _do_ have a Defense NEWT. I scored Outstanding.”

Audrey shrugs. “Just a precaution. Come on, let’s get our coffees and head upstairs to see what assignments the lawyers have given us to start on.”

Over the next few weeks, Percy sets himself to working and learning. Audrey, having been there for two summers already, has seniority, but she’s surprisingly amenable to helping him if he needs it and checks in on him a couple times a day. She’s chatty, always full of commentary about the lawyers, about something someone said at court, about something she overheard on the streets, but when she focuses on work she proves herself to be clever and efficient. She takes the time to show him around the Great Library in the Inns of Court, the law library that should hold the answers if the small library at Bones Goldstein doesn’t have it, and to walk him through his first appearances at set date court.

Set date court is exactly what it sounds like and is simultaneously both necessary and a massive waste of time. Once an accused is charged with a crime, the Ministry has the obligation to provide disclosure to the defense or a copy of all the evidence that they intend to rely on for trial. It is supposed to include Auror case notes, photos, witness statements, the complete case against the accused, and it rarely does. Three-quarters of the time, the first set of disclosure provided doesn’t meet the legal requirements; about a third of those times, there just isn’t enough evidence to make out the offence at all. Set date court is the ground for negotiations, where defence counsel[7] and the prosecution point out the weaknesses in each others’ cases. Charges can be withdrawn in set date court if defence counsel finds enough holes in the evidence, or they may come to a plea bargain. Only if the prosecution and defence agree that there can be no other terms will the matter be set down for a trial.

On one morning alone, he watches as Audrey has two sets of charges dismissed, bargains down another three files, and sets only one down for trial. For one set of charges, she calmly turns to the judge, and notes that the prosecution has had three appearances and nine weeks to produce the evidence supporting the charge, then says that the fact that they have failed to do so leads to logical conclusion that it doesn’t exist. The judge only glares at the prosecution, who hastily withdraws the charge then and there.

If they come to a plea bargain, the charge gets sent for a new date, and they go back to their client and talk them through the advantages and disadvantages of the new charges and of a plea. Most of their clients do plead guilty to lesser charges, and Percy is given responsibility for running the easiest of these guilty pleas the next week.

Set date court is a gross waste of time because it inevitably lasts all day. The prosecutors can work on a rotation, calling the list of matters in blocks that are convenient for them and for their cases, but defence counsel are stuck there for most of the day, just sitting and waiting for their cases to be called.

The clients aren’t at all what Percy expected. For the most part, they don’t seem dangerous—they seem completely normal.

There’s the youth offender caught pickpocketing, who they’re not sure is actually old enough to be charged at all because, for all that he says he’s fifteen, he still looks twelve. But when they press him on his age, he insists he’s fifteen. He insists up and down that he is fifteen years old, and even when they subtly hint that the age of responsibility is thirteen and he cannot be legally held responsible for something he does when he is under the age of thirteen, he only glares at them and says that he’s fifteen and he _isn’t_ lying. But it’s his first offence and he’s an orphan without any formal schooling, so they get him off on a conditional discharge[8] and off he jaunts back out onto the streets.

There’s the man who lost his temper and threw a glass of water on someone in the Leaky Cauldron when the wrong person is watching. At first, Percy thought he had literally thrown a full glass of water at someone, but it turns out that _assault with a weapon, to wit: water_ just means that he threw the water from a glass onto the complainant’s face. The complainant happened to be a Ministry official.

There’s even a young woman charged with filing a false sexual assault report. That one hurts—that is one where Audrey stomps back up to the second floor, locks herself in the bathroom and cries while Percy talks the woman through the process for a guilty plea. The case against her is a solid one, and the plea deal is good, and the woman just nods and agrees with an empty look in her eyes.

“You know she’s lying, right?” Audrey asks later, sliding back into the seat behind Percy, red-eyed. “About the rape.”

Percy turns around, to look at his officemate and fellow student, sometimes his friend. Her eyes are rimmed in red, and she’ll pulling out a palette of makeup already. “She wants to plead guilty, Audrey.”

“But you know that she’s lying. The rape happened. She reported it. Then, something happened—someone threatened her, I don’t know—so she went to withdraw her report. The Aurors got mad and charged her.” Audrey sniffs. “And now she’s more afraid of whatever it is on the other side than she is of a criminal conviction. But she was raped.”

Percy pauses, looking her over, then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a worn handkerchief and offers it to her. “Just in case your makeup comes off again.”

She nods and takes it, turning back around and getting back to work.

There is rather a lot of work. Percy misses dinner with his family more often than he makes it, and the few times that he does make it, he just eats in silence, packs up a box, and takes it back to the office for Audrey. He lives more at the office than he does at home; his parents think he’s overworking, while his brothers are convinced that he’s making up work to stay at the office. None of them understand that since Percy spends three days a week stranded in set date court and guilty pleas, he needs every day he can get and most evenings to prepare his cases for next week and to complete the endless research memoranda that the lawyers assign him.

It’s traditional for articling students to work hard. As hard as Percy works, Audrey works harder—she doesn’t go home three times a week to see her family. She’s slept in the office at least twice since they started, if Percy has it right, and she never leaves before ten at night. She’s always back by at eight the next morning, doing last minute prep for another day in court.

Percy knows because he’s there with her, most days and nights. They trade off brewing the coffee and bringing each other mugs, and even if they spent hours in focused, concentrated silence, it becomes a comfortable one.

* * *

The first time they go to PLTC, it is Friday and Audrey is stressed. Her robes are too clean, too pressed, a sharp black and she’s put on a little more eyeliner than she does normally. Percy notices, but he doesn’t ask about it, even as she pulls on a pair of three-and-a-half inch heels that he knows she hates. Her hair is twisted in a neat bun at the base of her neck, her fringe is fluffed up and curled, and her lips are cherry red. She’s learned from Lizzie how to turn beauty into a weapon, which is exactly what Percy has figured out by now.

Lizzie Bones likes to look good, but a large part of it is a trick. Men underestimate women who are beautiful, and lawyers are no exception. Percy is no exception—his first interview with Lizzie Bones ended with him spilling more truth than he had ever imagined he would in any formal situation, and somehow it had gone better for him than anywhere else. Whatever else one said about Bones Goldstein, after four nearly eighty-hour weeks, he feels more at home there than he has possibly anywhere else. They see each other at their best, and at their worst, and everywhere in-between. He sees Audrey flushed with success, and or fresh off an angry burst of tears, and just once, when she is feeling particularly murderous, he watches as she very calmly goes into the boardroom, conjures a flock of birds, and plays target practice for an hour with her wand.

The PLTC takes place in the bowels of the Inns of Court, in small, bowl-shaped room with a simple wooden podium at the front. The desks are small, with wooden tables that slide up from the side and over their laps. The air is thick with dust, and the moment Percy walks in, he can see that the room is already divided into two groups.

“Audrey!” a dark-haired, brown-skinned woman chirps, waving her over. “Good to see you! How is Bones Goldstein?”

“Busy.” Audrey sighs, visibly relaxing as she walks over to join her friend. “I must have docketed three hundred hours in the last month. Oh, this is Percy, the other student at my firm. Percy, Nadia Zaman, from Adams Hicks, and Robert McCormick, from Rosen & Associates.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Percy says, and he means it. From the way that Audrey greets them, and the fact that he doesn’t recognize them, he assumes that they’re her friends from America—fellow halfbloods or Muggleborns, not allowed to school at Hogwarts.

Both of them look at him curiously, but they’re friendly enough, and Percy leans against a nearby desk listening to them catch up. It’s mostly talk about their work, about how many hours they’ve each done in the last month, about the sheer dullness of the first unit of their bar admission course.

Penny walks in, and Percy catches her eye and tries to wave her over. She sees him, smiles slightly, but hesitates before shaking her head and walking over to join the other cluster of students. Percy recognizes Darren Corner, Michael Phipps, Allison McAllister, Jason Reed, Priscilla Carmichael—his fellow classmates from Hogwarts, at the Ministry and the big firms to which he had originally applied.

He pauses, but he hasn’t seen any of them for over a month. Most of them aren’t in the criminal courts, not even Penny, and he should catch up with them. He taps Audrey on the arm, gesturing to the other group. “I’m going to say hello to my old classmates. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She doesn’t reply, but she waves her hand in acknowledgement, and he walks over to the desk that Penny has chosen, in the second row beside Corner.

“Penny,” he says. “How have you been?”

She shrugs, the bags under her eyes obvious. “Busy. And you?”

“Busy.” Percy pauses. “I haven’t seen you in criminal court yet?”

“The Ministry has a rotation system for their articled students, so I started in the corporate division.” Penny shakes her head. “It’s been all procurement and transfer payment agreements for me. Three months here, then I move into legislative drafting for a month, then three months in civil litigation and only prosecutions at the end.”

“I see.” Percy frowns, mildly jealous. It sounds like a well-rounded program—except for the PLTC, all Percy will learn from a practical perspective is criminal law. There will be transferable skills, because Percy will likely have more courtroom experience than anyone on this side of the room, but he won’t have the wide range of contract, advice, and drafting experience that Penny will get.

The door to the room bangs open, and a man in black robes walks in. “Sit down, everyone. We only have three hours for me to teach the lot of you about professional responsibility, and I assume you’ve all had the chance to read the materials so that we can make the most of it. So, let’s get to it: you’ll all fuck up. Now, when you fuck up, what are you going to do?”

Percy sighs, sits down in the seat beside Penny, and pulls out a yellow legal pad and a Muggle pen. Four weeks in, Audrey has already converted him to them—they’re less messy, he doesn’t need to take breaks to dip his quill in ink, and he writes at least twice as fast with them as he ever did with a quill. The office even stocks them, and no one seems to mind that he swipes them.

The lecture is interesting enough, though it reiterates the same points that were in their incredibly dull reading materials. Percy has been pacing himself, having marked milestones to reach every weekend, while Audrey crammed them within the last week. Penny, Percy would bet, probably read a bit every evening before she went to bed, then finished off the entire volume the night before.

He takes notes, propping his foot up on the chair in front of him and setting the legal pad against his knee. By now, he doesn’t need to think about the process of flipping page, after page, after page—the days of pinning down a piece of parchment with one hand while scrawling with the other are over. He doesn’t even need the tiny excuse for a desk at his side, which is far too small for either his notepad or a scroll of parchment. The things are useless.

After the lecture, as they’re packing up, Penny turns to him. “We’re going for drinks, at the Leaky Cauldron. Do you want to come with?”

“Yes—why don’t I invite the others?” Percy nods towards the three students sitting on the other side of the room.

She hesitates. “Three more might be…”

“We’re a large enough group, three people aren’t going to make a difference,” Percy points out, raising a hand to motion the other three over. “We’re all going through the same experience, articling, and in the same class—”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Weasley,” Corner cuts in, glancing at the other three students across the room. “We all went to Hogwarts, and I mean—we can catch up, but they won’t be able to relate, you know?”

“That’s hardly something they could control,” Percy snaps, his eyes shifting over to glare at Corner.

Corner shakes his head. “It’s not a good idea, Weasley. We wouldn’t have anything in common—”

“Like law?”

“Well, criminal law is really different,” Corner says, and it sounds pathetic to Percy’s ears. “Look, we’re going to the Leaky—you can come if you want, but the others… I don’t know how well the others would take to them. Penny, you coming?”

“Yes, just give me a moment.” Penny glances over at Percy but grabs his forearm to keep him from leaving. She smiles as Percy’s former classmates walk out of the room, then leans over to whisper in his ear. “You should really think about coming—if you want to switch out of criminal law later, they’re the connections you’d need. See you later.”

She disappears from the room, swinging her bag over her shoulder, while Percy stares after her.

“What was that about?” Audrey asks, touching him on the arm. “We’re heading for drinks in Muggle London, do you want to come?”

“Yes, er—” Percy stops and takes a deep breath, wondering if maybe, for the first time ever, his Gryffindor Sorting might finally make sense. Better to ask for forgiveness than permission, as his brothers might say. “The other articling students are going for a drink in the Leaky Cauldron—should we join them?”

“Nah,” Audrey replies, with a sad sort of grimace. “We know we’re not welcome, and criminal defence has always been a bit of an outsider. We’re dirty, and we’re not afraid to get dirty, either. Come on, Perce, let us show you some of Muggle London.”

Percy hesitates for a long moment, looking after his former classmates, some of whom he might have even called his friends. Penny was his friend. And then he looks towards the three students that are still in the room: Audrey, who is looking up at him with an expression of concern and resignation, all at once, and the slightly suspicious looks of her two friends.

Sometimes, crossroads don’t look like crossroads. Sometimes, they’re just moments. And in that moment, Percy feels more comfortable with Audrey and her friends than he does trying to chase after the people he once knew in school, the ones that, seven years later, he still calls by surname.

“I don’t have anything to wear in the Muggle world,” he says, trying for levity. “You know, pureblood and all that.”

“I’m sure Rob can find something in his closet that’ll fit.” Audrey smiles, glancing at her friend, who looks to be a good three inches shorter than Percy and possibly thirty pounds heavier. “Or, at least—we’re mages, we’ll witch them to make them fit. It’ll work, don’t worry about it.”

Muggle beer is strange, but good, Percy decides several hours and several pints later. He particularly likes Guinness, likes the bitter and rich aftertaste that it leaves on his tongue, and instead of risking the Apparition home to the Burrow in his inebriated state, Audrey lets him crash on her sofa.

He returns the favour by waking her up at nine in the morning the next day and reminding her that they both have at least two research memos that need to be done by Monday morning.

* * *

Month pass. Percy’s life falls into a brutal, never-ending rhythm: court, two to three days a week, followed by preparation for another day. Disclosure reviews, where he parses from the spaces between the lines what the Ministry is missing, and interviews with sobbing and upset clients, and research for more complicated cases for the lawyers. He has file reviews once per week with Lizzie, who spends two hours every Friday picking through his cases with a fine-toothed comb. When he misses things, she lets him know it with a mix of kindness and hard-hitting mockery, and he learns from them as much from her as he does just from being in court, watching the lawyers there negotiate with the prosecution and argue before the judge. He sees and admires the calm, firm demeanour in which the Law Lords govern their courtrooms.

His cases become more and more complicated, and Lizzie starts sending him to bail court. Mere assault charges become more sexual assault or assault with a weapon, and theft under becomes theft over[9] and fraud. He begins helping Lizzie, or Richard, or Steve or Bert or Kate on their more complex cases, there to turn pages of disclosure to a neatly highlighted paragraph, to have whispered conferences about precedent, and to keep their clients calm through one of the most terrifying experiences of their lives.

He comes to a deeper understanding of their clients. Life isn’t black and white; for so many people, it isn’t a question of following the right path or not. Some people seem to be doomed from the beginning—there are the orphan children, who grow up on the streets stealing for their survival, because Wizarding Britain does not have a formal fostering system. The Muggle one does, but by the time they come to Bones Goldstein with their first charges at thirteen or fourteen, it is often too little and too late. Others make a mistake, one night with too much to drink, and Percy as the former Head Boy is very familiar with drunken stupidity. The difference is, at Hogwarts, they got off with a scolding, points off, and detention; in the real world, they get criminal charges. Still others commit a crime, admit it and have no regrets, but there’s always a reason.

Often those reasons are very good ones.

Geoffrey Baker keeps getting charged with assault and assault with a weapon. Every time, he admits it. Every time, it’s against the same person: his brother-in-law. And every time, it’s because his brother-in-law smacks his sister around and the Aurors, seeing it as word against word, never lay charges. So Geoffrey takes matters into his own hands, and while he’s certainly guilty of every charge he has been given, no one in the Ministry seems to have worked out that charging the brother-in-law might solve the problem better. Instead, Geoffrey Baker gets a reputation for being a bruiser who belongs behind bars, though he’s really more of a loving and frustrated brother with a temper and poor impulse control.

There is always a reason, and the lines between guilty and innocent blur. The words that Penny told him months ago, and that he memorized for his interview, begin ringing more true than ever: this is an adversarial system, and the powers of the government must be kept in check by a strong defence bar.

The prosecution has too much power. The prosecution has the manpower, they have a hundred Aurors and law clerks at their disposal, and politically law and order has always flown better than the rights of the accused. But Aurors and the prosecution are human like any other, and they make just as many mistakes as anyone else.

All the accused have is defence counsel: underpaid, considering the sheer number of hours he works, and overworked. But it’s good work, and it’s worthwhile work, and Percy is almost surprised to find that he enjoys it very much indeed.

His clients listen to him. They respect him and trust him. They even like him, just as his coworkers do, and Percy starts getting the feeling that maybe he isn’t quite as dour, quite as stiff or quite as boring as his family has always made him out to be. The defence bar welcomes him, and he joins Audrey and her friends at the pub in Muggle London once a week. He even buys his own Muggle clothes for these outings—t-shirts, zip-up sweatshirts, and jeans. He develops a taste for jazz and dark beer, and the tiny articling student office becomes part home, part work, and part safe haven.

He forgets what he told his family about his work. It isn’t as though they ask him much about the details of his job anyway, other than to say that because Percy is doing it, that it must be very boring indeed, probably something about the thickness of cauldron bottoms or something else similarly dull. Percy only points out that regulations on cauldron bottoms are critical for consumer safety and doesn’t bother to respond further. He doesn’t really have the energy to dive into a complex discussion about his work, and three quarters of his mind is always spinning on his cases, searching for the elusive reasonable doubt. No one notices, because a good thing about having so many siblings is that they talk over him.

All of which makes the eventual explosion more memorable.

“Percy,” his dad says slowly over dinner, late in November. It’s shepherd’s pie, and he’s mostly thinking about a research memo on duress that he needs to get done. He’s in court tomorrow morning, so he needs to make serious headway on it tonight, or he’ll be sleeping at the office tomorrow. And he still needs to finish his readings for civil procedure before the PLTC lecture on Friday, too.

“Yes?”

“I saw you at court today.” Dad’s eyebrows are furrowed over his round glasses.

“Yes.” Percy was in bail court all morning, getting three of their firm’s clients off with sureties or on their own recognizance[10], then it was client meetings all afternoon. But Dad sounds concerned, so he looks up from his pie. “I’m an articled student, Dad. I do often go to court.”

“You were in bail court,” his dad replies. “Getting people out of prison pending trial.”

“Yes,” Percy says, puzzled, before the rest of his brain catches up with his mouth. His mother looks aghast, his brothers surprised. “Er, well, yes.”

“You were getting _criminals_ out of jail?!” His mother’s voice is scaling in pitch. “I thought you were working at a reputable firm! I thought you were handling Ministry cases!”

Percy sits, open-mouthed for a second. Where does he even begin? First, getting out on bail is, by definition, a release pending trial. Persons who are let out on bail have not yet been convicted of the crimes alleged, and a fair number of them will have their charges withdrawn or pled down for a conditional discharge or suspended sentence anyway. There’s no reason to hold people pending trial unless they pose a serious and ongoing danger to society, and in fact it would be a waste of Ministry resources to do so. The system works, if weirdly and strangely and oddly, and most people are let out who should be. Percy thinks that, if anything, the courts err on the side of not releasing prisoners who should be released.

Second, he is at a reputable firm. Bones Goldstein is one of the best criminal defence firms in the country. His principal is _Lizzie Bones_ , one of the best criminal defence lawyers right now, specializing in sexual assault cases. The public largely hates her—but lawyers want to be her. She is confident, and she is mean, and she stands for what she believes in no matter now unpopular her view might be. Yes, she mocks him rather a lot, but Percy has been through worse and the reflected respect he hears ringing through people’s voices when he goes to court and introduces himself is worth every jibe.

Third, he _is_ handling Ministry cases. Criminal law is, by definition, Ministry. He just happens to be working on the defence rather than on the prosecution, working to protect the people rather than to protect the state.

“I am?” he says, sounding more uncertain than he feels. The uncertainty is that he isn’t sure which statement he’s responding to, not because he doesn’t know what he believes. “Yes, I was in bail court this morning, and Bones Goldstein is a very reputable firm. The best criminal defence firm in the country, you know.”

“Criminal _defence_? _”_ His mother screeches. “Percy, that’s dangerous! I thought you were working on Ministry cases, for the Ministry! I thought you wanted a good job, a respectable job, and you’re—you’re rubbing shoulders with criminals!”

Percy is, of his brothers, the least confrontational. It isn’t that Percy doesn’t yell—he does, but it’s always for the easy things. Percy yelled at students at school for breaking the rules, he yells at the twins when they play pranks on him and mess up his things—but Percy doesn’t _fight_. Percy doesn’t take on hard topics, he doesn’t feel the need to debate, and he doesn’t want to sit there and defend the fact that really, cauldron bottom regulations are critical for ensuring public safety when he thinks no one is listening. Percy only takes on fights that matter.

Criminal defence is a fight that matters.

“Why is it dangerous?” Percy challenges, settling his fork down on his plate very deliberately. “Bill’s a Curse-breaker, Charlie is a dragon-keeper, and the twins probably endanger themselves more with their inventions than they’re willing to admit. Why is working in _criminal defence_ dangerous?”

“The people you’re coming into contact with—”

“My clients?” Percy pushes his plate away. “Many of them are impoverished. A lot of them can’t prove their blood status—a good number have little by way of formal education. Some are just unlucky, and even those that aren’t tend to have reasons for what they did.”

“Reasons?” His mother stares at him like he’s grown another head.

“Reasons,” Percy confirms, his voice dipping a few degrees. “And even if they didn’t, they would be entitled to a full defence under law.”

“How can you defend someone when you know they’ve done it?” Ron ventures, his eyes wide. Despite his words, he genuinely sounds interested.

“Because even if they did do it, the onus is on the Ministry to prove it.” Percy folds his napkin on his lap with quick, sharp movements. “Because even if they did do it, everyone does stupid things from time to time, and whether or not you’re criminally charged is often a matter of your station in life. The twins regularly commit assault, assault with a weapon, and any number of offences that might be characterized broadly as hexing people without their consent—if they were in the Lower Alleys, they’d probably have a record as long as their arms.”

“But the twins aren’t—”

“Cool, we’re criminals,” Fred interjects with a grin, while George shoots Percy a look that tells him that he needs to simmer down, let the twins defuse the situation. “At least we now have a brother who’ll get us off! George, we should think about matching tattoos, don’t you think?”

Percy sucks in a breath, reaching for his glass of water. George’s voice is light, amused. “What makes you think I want a _matching_ tattoo with you? If we did, people could finally tell us apart—if we get one, it needs to be identical.”

“Too true—”

“But what about everything you always wanted, dear?” Mum interrupts, still staring at Percy—Percy who has always been the easy one, Percy who likes structure and order and predictability, Percy who has never really fought for anything in his entire life. “Being a lawyer, yes, that makes sense—but you always wanted security, and you always craved a position of power. You can’t get there in criminal defense, there’s nothing lower than defending criminals.”

Percy doesn’t respond. Instead, he very deliberately puts down his glass of water, his head whirling with thoughts.

It isn’t that this isn’t _true._ Percy has always wanted power, and respect, and all the things that come with it. He did want to join the Ministry once, because it seemed like a secure path and a place where he could distinguish himself, a place where he could grow his family’s profile. It’s even true that, as well-respected as he might become as a criminal defense lawyer, it is a very different kind of respect than he would have gotten as an upper-level Ministry employee.

It’s that the meaning of respect has changed. It’s that Percy wants to be respected, but he wants to be respected for the things he has done, the beliefs that he stands up for, the wrongs that he has righted. He wants respect from the people who know what it is that he does, from people who stand with him in set date court, in bail court and at trial, defending the public from the vast array of micro-transgressions of individual rights that their state is so prone to committing. He wants to be Lizzie Bones, the less successful Bones sister, and yet the one that every lawyer wants to be.

He doesn’t care about amorphous respect, anymore. He doesn’t care about the Ministry position anymore, or about his fanciful thought of writing the laws that the Ministry has to follow. The Ministry doesn’t even follow the laws already there, or he wouldn’t be in set date court perpetually reminding them of their disclosure obligations. Writing the laws the Ministry needs to follow is not a matter of sitting and drafting, but the everyday work of a hundred defence lawyers who, case by case and hour by hour, hold the Ministry accountable to the rights they have won and push the law incrementally forward.

He has a memorandum to write.

“I have to go back to work,” he says, and his voice is chilly. “I’m back in court tomorrow, and there’s lots to do.”

* * *

Percy moves out. Audrey helps him find a tiny bedsit in Muggle London, which is all he really needs. He’s spent his entire life living with, first, a handful of siblings and then sharing a dorm at boarding school, and the privacy of even one room is all he needs. He’d trade his tiny kitchen for a private bathroom, but the shared bathroom down the hall is clean enough—and if it isn’t, he can cast a mean Cleaning Charm.

It’s not as if he spends much time at his bedsit anyway. Articling students traditionally work their tails off during articles, and he is no exception. Most of his time is spent at court, at the office, and, strangely, at Audrey’s flat.

Her flat is nicer than his, and he learns that her parents, a witch and a Muggle, live in Birmingham. She can Apparate and does have an Apparition licence, but the way she puts it, she likes to live in the middle of the action. She’s eighteen years old, with a satisfactory paycheque that goes farther in Muggle London than it does anywhere in Diagon Alley, and there are a thousand restaurants and pubs and bars for her to try. Her flat ends up being where they, being Percy, Audrey, and the other two students articling defence-side study for the PLTC and bar admission exams over endless boxes of Indian takeaway.

The PLTC is firmly divided into two camps. There is everyone that Percy went to school with at Hogwarts on the right side of the room, closer to the door; and there is Percy and Audrey and the other students from the criminal defence firms on the other side. It’s easy to look at it as a blood barrier, but it’s not that, not precisely. Most people who are defence-side are lesser-blooded and schooled abroad, which is logical given that they aren’t allowed to work for the Ministry, and most of the full-service firms are careful to craft their appearance to be acceptable to the public at large. That means, in the current political environment, avoiding hiring halfbloods or Muggleborns in the absence of good reason.

It’s more that criminal lawyers have always stood a little apart from the civil lawyers and solicitors. Their area of law is so specialized that Percy now considers himself lucky to have even gotten a position at a defence firm when he hasn’t summered with one. Penny, of whom he had been so jealous months before, doesn’t stand up in a courtroom until the end of January, and even then, it’s only set date court. The other Hogwarts students talk about writing endless research memoranda, shadowing senior lawyers, taking notes and carrying bags.

By February, Percy is running his own trials. They aren’t serious trials—they’re not proceedings by indictment[11], for which only the lawyers have standing to argue, but they’re his own files. They’re his own cases, for which he runs almost entirely from beginning to end.

He runs a trial on a theft charge. It’s a break-in at a shop just off Diagon Alley, but the factual matrix brings identity into question. The accused wasn’t caught on the scene and had in fact been arrested several streets away, which Percy thought might give him enough for reasonable doubt. He gets lucky—the witnesses they had which might been able to link his client to the break-in simply don’t remember enough. Or, maybe it’s not luck so much as it is the fact that, given that the break-in was in the early evening and it was growing dark, Percy had counted on the fact that the witnesses wouldn’t remember.

There’s another trial on an assault charge. That one doesn’t go so well—no matter how he poses the questions, the complainant’s testimony is consistent, and between his testimony and the physical evidence, there’s not much he can do. Instead, he focuses on sentencing submissions after the fact, pointing out that his client has no formal education and is agreeable to joining an anger management support group. The client is upset but leaves with a lesser sentence than he likely would have had otherwise.

He even runs a trial for assault with a weapon, to wit: water. It is one of his first clients, a file he has run almost from the first set-date. The facts are completely ridiculous. Eric Totten, a young man who has no priors and a decent job stocking shelves at an apothecary in Diagon Alley, got into a spitting match with Kurt Davis, a minor Ministry official, in the Leaky Cauldron over a dish that was erroneously served to Eric’s table rather than Davis’. Davis, apparently in a very bad mood, begins the argument, and it ends when Eric says that Davis can enjoy eating the leftovers if it’s that important to him and throws a glass of water in the other man’s face. Unluckily for Eric, there is an Auror two booths over.

Percy enjoys taking apart Kurt Davis on the stand. He comes across as vindictive, too gleeful, while Eric comes across as understandably frustrated and annoyed and very sorry that he lost his temper. The trial takes most of a day, but His Honour ultimately grants an absolute discharge[12] noting the provocation and dryly comments that the complainant ought to consider a Drying Charm next time.

He stops going home for dinner—even before, when he did, it was an exception. It’s easier for either him or Audrey to run out to Aroma Alley or Muggle London for takeaway and to work through dinner than it is to go home. His parents send him owls, and he replies only to say that he’s fine, just busy. He’s not angry or upset, he’s just busy. And this is the truth.

Criminal law has always been a strange area in which to practice. The questions that his family has posed is no different than anyone else in the public, and it’s something to which every criminal lawyer learns to respond. Practicing criminal law as defence counsel is about standing up for principles, about defending people who may have done horrible things, and about doing so in the face of unpopularity and criticism. Other lawyers understand, but few outside law do.

He works. He dockets two hundred and eighty hours in February, another three hundred hours in March. He, along with the other articling students, wrap themselves in a world of law and each other. The first time he ends up in bed with Audrey, it’s hardly a surprise considering they’ve studied too late and drunk too much, Rob and Nadia have taken her sitting room couch and floor, and Percy just happens to end up in her bed.

The morning after, when she wakes up wrapped around him like he’s her personal body pillow, that’s a bit more surprising. She’s worse than an octopus, and he’s barely halfway disentangled himself when Rob shows up in the doorframe.

“Committing lawcest?” he asks with a smirk, and Percy only casts a withering glare at him.

“Hardly,” he mutters, and he continues wiggling the rest of his way out from Audrey’s arms and legs, making his way to the kitchen where he begins frying eggs and making toast.

The winter passes faster than he expects, a rhythm of court and client meetings and case preparation that he becomes better at managing as the days pass. It’s almost as if he wakes up, and it’s April, and he and every other articling student is staring at two weeks of exams. One week to prepare, and another to write. Eight exams, graded only pass or fail, but they need a straight line of passes as well as a recommendation by their principals to be called to the bar in May.

They hole up in Audrey’s apartment with endless snacks and spend the time burning information into their brains. Percy is in a better position than most—his notes are organized and colour-coded, and he’s already made it through the materials once. Audrey, feeling guilted, has at least managed to read the materials with a highlighter, while the other two are frantically paging through their books. Percy thinks about making them study schedules, but eventually just tells them to toss the Professional Responsibility and Criminal Law sections and to focus on everything else. They have no experience in the other areas of law, ranging from Contracts to Civil Procedure to Real Property, so they are far likelier to fail them than the areas in which they practiced for the last ten months.

The exams are three hours long each, two per day, over a week. The procedures to get into the exams are stricter than even the OWLs and the NEWTs that Percy sat at Hogwarts. They all arrive two hours early to be searched, and while Percy makes it through clear, Nadia has a package of Muggle feminine hygiene products confiscated because the invigilators deem that they can somehow be used for cheating. Audrey is at a loss, since it isn’t her time of the month, but Penny slips over and teaches her a quick emergency spell that she uses when she’s been caught unprepared.

Someone in the room has a cold, the entire week of the exams. It drives Percy wild, the sniffling, and on the third day a bird is trapped in the building and spends the entire time chirping. They’re made to write with Anti-Cheating quills, which drive Percy crazy after months of using non-drippy Muggle pens, but at least he knows how to use them. The students who were educated abroad had to go out of their way to learn how to write, and they’re all obviously slower at it than any of the ones trained at Hogwarts.

That shouldn’t impact their scores, though. The trick with these exams is that they aren’t a matter of writing speed, they’re a matter of thought, and a succinct answer is often better than a lengthy one. The exams aren’t hard—they’re meant to provide a baseline of competence, and these exams are considerably easier than either the OWLs or the NEWTs. The hardest part about becoming a lawyer is making it through articling, and Percy knows he’s flown through it already.

Eight exams, over four days. And when he walks out of the Inns of Court after his Estates and Trusts exam, it is May.

* * *

He sends an owl home to his parents, letting them know the date of his Call to the Bar ceremony. It’ll be the first time he dons his tabs[13] as well as his robes, and it’s a weekday in the middle of May. He doesn’t know who else in his family will be able to attend, or who would even want to attend. His younger siblings are all at Hogwarts still, and Bill and Charlie are abroad. It’s him, and it’s his parents, and it’s the new circle of friends he has developed among the defence bar.

The morning of the Call to the Bar, his robes are pressed and swing neatly above his polished boots. It takes him a few minutes to decipher the clasp on his tabs, and to put them on so they lay properly on his chest, but he’s at the Inns of Court well before time. They all need to file their petitions for admission to the bar, including a certificate of fitness and recommendation signed by their articling principals, and then they need to sign the Rolls of the Court. There are only ten articled students this year, but somehow it still takes over an hour for each of them to present their documents, to pick up the quill, and to sign the Rolls. He takes the time to fix Audrey’s tabs, which she has somehow managed to put on upside-down.

In the courtyard of the Inns of Court, Percy can’t help turning around to look for his family members. His parents are there—he spots the shock of red hair identifying them—and he breaks into a smile as Bill gives him a small wave. He can see Nadia’s parents, at the back of the courtyard, and Audrey turns around to poke him and point out her own parents. Even her father is there, looking uncomfortable in robes that he isn’t used to wearing as a Muggle, but this is a ceremony among lawyers and the Inns of Court are notoriously defensive of their self-regulation. No one will be commenting on the Muggles in Diagon Alley today.

A year of sleepless nights, too much work, and a hundred new experiences lead to this moment. Over the last year, he’s made new friends. He’s worked hard, negotiating with the prosecution, meeting clients, drafting submissions and researching obscure points of criminal law. He’s gotten lost at least six times in the bowels of the Great Library, and he’s developed a taste for Guinness and jazz. He’s moved out, experienced the strange thrill and exhaustion of trial, and he’s being called to the bar.

The first Weasley lawyer in, he thinks, ever.

When Lady Bones, the invited speaker for this year’s pool of applicants, gestures for them to stand for their oaths, Percy doesn’t hesitate.

“Repeat after me,” she says, with a warmer smile than Percy has ever seen her wear in court, and she flicks out an old, yellowed scroll, and begins reading with pauses every half-sentence for the students to murmur the words after her.

“I accept the honour and privilege, duty and responsibility of practising law as a barrister and solicitor of the nation of Wizarding Britain. I shall protect and defend the rights and interests of such persons as may employ me. I shall conduct all cases faithfully and to the best of my ability. I shall neglect no one’s interest and shall faithfully serve and diligently represent the best interests of my client. I shall not refuse causes of complaint reasonably founded, nor shall I promote suits upon frivolous pretences. I shall not pervert the law to favour or prejudice anyone, but in all things I shall conduct myself honestly and with integrity and civility. I shall seek to ensure access to justice and access to legal services. I shall seek to improve the administration of justice. I shall champion the rule of law and safeguard the rights and freedoms of all persons. I shall strictly observe and uphold the ethical standards that govern my profession. All this I do swear to observe and perform to the best of my knowledge and ability.”

The words are old, and they’re weighty with the sense of thousands of people swearing it before him. There’s no magic in it—only responsibility. He feels a mantle of duty settle on his shoulders, and he welcomes it.

His parents are proud. Dad is a little perplexed, but Mum’s smile is huge as she wraps him in a congratulatory hug.

“I’m sorry for arguing with you,” she whispers in his ear as she lets him go. “I was just surprised, that’s all. As long as you’re happy, that’s all I need. We’re so proud of you.”

“Thank you, Mum,” Percy replies, letting a rare smile come out across his face. Bill slaps him on the back, all the approval that Percy needs.

“What comes next?” he asks, wiggling his eyebrows. “Barrister and solicitor—Ministry job? Another firm? Setting up your own firm?”

“I’m going back to Bones Goldstein,” Percy admits. It isn’t expected—most students with the major full-service firms or the Ministry can expect to be hired back for at least a year, but most in criminal law are sent out to build their own practices. The fact that Percy has gotten hired back is unusual, possible only because Steve has decided to steal Audrey for his own, newly established firm that will specialize in self-defence cases, leaving an opening for Percy.

It isn’t the Ministry. Percy doesn’t even want to work at the Ministry anymore, nor does he want try for a job in a full-service firm, if they would even have him. The more he looks at his former classmates there, and the more he looks at where he was, he feels like he ended up where he belonged. He isn’t carrying boxes for other people. He isn't taking notes for other people. He has his own responsibilities, his own clients, his own files. He stands up in court on his own every day. For all that the Ministry and the full-service firms have more prestige, he thinks he’s gotten more experience being a lawyer than anyone else from Hogwarts.

Law isn’t anything like what he had expected. It isn’t the haven from neapotism that he had once sought; he doesn’t even earn as much as he would have had he taken an entry-level Ministry job. He is respected, but less so by the public at large than he would have originally wanted; instead, the respect he receives is from his colleagues, from other lawyers at the bar. His success depends on himself, but it is also built on a foundation of guidance from people like Lizzie Bones, his articling principal, or Audrey Smith and Nadia Zaman and Robert McCormick, his fellow articling students. It very much matters what his personality is like, because his personality is what the full-service firms rejected, but it also makes him a fit in criminal defence. He doesn’t write new laws.

But he does help people. He helps people, and he holds the Ministry accountable for their actions. The law is a complicated, multilayered beast, where there is good, and there is bad, and there is beauty.

* * *

* * *

[1] Law as a profession in common law jurisdictions is traditionally entered into by way of an apprenticeship called “articling”. In recent years, many countries have gotten rid of the articling requirement and replaced it with schooling and exams, but many common-law jurisdictions still include articling as a requirement for licencing. It is residency for lawyers.

[2] Full-service firms are law firms that, in theory, handle any sort of legal problem that one might have, from real estate to a tax dispute to litigation. Despite the name, however, most will not handle criminal law. Most of these firms serve large businesses and corporations.

[3] Traditionally law firms are not permitted to incorporate, so the structure is a partnership. Partners are part-owners of a firm, and generally they have associates (employees) that work under them and for which they are entitled to a portion of the billed income. “Making partner” is a big deal at firms. Senior Counsel is the same prestige as making partner for lawyers who work in government or in-house at a bank or other corporation.

[4] An articling principal, being the lawyer responsible for the articled student. In jurisdictions requiring articling, the articling principal is responsible for the student’s education and is the one certifying that the student should be admitted to the bar. Without certification, one cannot be admitted to the bar.

[5] Become judges. In not-American common-law jurisdictions, judges are appointed, not elected, often from a list of names put together and recommended to government by the bar association.

[6] The ceremony for being admitted to the bar is called the Call to the Bar. In most courtrooms, there is a physical bar or barrier separating lawyers from the public, and only lawyers are permitted to cross it. Even law students need explicit permission of the court to cross the bar.

[7] A note on language: in general, “attorney” is not used for lawyers outside America and in fact has a very different meaning legally as it is just “someone with authority to act for someone else”, e.g. power of attorney. More commonly, lawyers are called “counsel”. In some jurisdictions people might use “barrister” or “solicitor”. In the UK (but not in this fic), law is a split profession where one is either a barrister (a courtroom lawyer) or a solicitor (not a courtroom lawyer), but not necessarily both. Most other jurisdictions (Canada, Australia, US) have a unified profession where all lawyers are both barristers and solicitors

[8] A conditional discharge is basically probation without a criminal record. Finish the probation with no further problems, no criminal record. Suspended sentences are probation but there will be a criminal record.

[9] Lawyer slang for two different theft charges: theft under $5000 tends to be treated as a minor offence or misdemeanour, theft over $5000 can be (but isn’t always) treated as indictable or a felony.

[10] Sureties – when released on bail, the surety is another person who guarantees, often with their money on the line, that you’ll behave and show up for trial. Being released on your own recognizance means the system trusts you enough (or you’ve put up enough of your own money that you can be trusted) to behave and show up at your own trial.

[11] More serious offences usually have different rules. As an articled student, Percy has standing for misdemeanours or minor offences, but not for serious offences or felonies. Usually this comes with a more formalized court procedure, including preliminary inquiries, etc.

[12] This is the lowest level sentence anyone can get—it’s a finding of guilt that does not go on your criminal record with no other conditions or probation.

[13] Lawyer wear along with the robes. It looks like a white ascot left hanging out.

**Author's Note:**

> Not only are there footnotes, there are endnotes! I dug deep into my memories to put this piece together, because really... no one quite understands what it is to be a lawyer until they go through the process and become a lawyer. So here are the more general comments on choices I made and lawyer culture that I built in, which didn't need to be included in the footnotes.
> 
> In terms of the legal education process, articling is and remains the licensing process for many common-law jurisdictions, including mine. Usually, this is combined with the bar exams, though the bar exams are considerably easier and have pass rates well over 90%. The true barrier really is finding articles. Like Percy goes through over Interview Weekend, the vast majority of articling gigs are given out in a heavily micromanaged process over about a week. If you don't get a job in it, you really have to pound the pavement to find an articling principal to take you on. The interviews themselves can be either substantive or conversational; substantive interviews are like oral exams, but conversational ones are essentially chatting about interests. Most law firms prefer conversational interviews because they figure if you are passing law school, you're smart enough, they just want to know whether or not they'll want to kill you if they spend more than twelve hours a day with you. What personality you can show off in thirty minutes is extraordinarily important. 
> 
> Articling students do traditionally work very hard, and two to three hundred hours a month is quite normal. Culturally, making it through articles is a badge of honour, so there's little impetus to change. Law and articling students do end up often committing lawcest and dating or sleeping with each other, which is an act simultaneously frowned upon and extremely common. 
> 
> Criminal lawyers tend to cluster among themselves early on. Criminal defence firms are very picky; getting into one usually requires summering in criminal defence. Personality-wise, criminal law also tends to attract a very different crowd than the full-service firms or other areas. Criminal defence lawyers really do hear everything that, first, Percy says about criminal defence, and then that he hears from his family. I should also note that everything that Percy says to Penny about not being able to work for the defence but wanting to work for the Ministry would absolutely enrage any criminal lawyer, who often bounce between prosecution and defence throughout their careers. In this fic, the criminal defence students except for Percy all happen to be lesser-blooded, and in real life it's still where lawyers from more disadvantaged backgrounds tend to go. For the most part, criminal defence is considered less prestigious than getting a big law job, and it is nowhere near as well-paid. But at the same time, we're all sworn to the same oath, which is included here in an slightly amended state.
> 
> I always liked the couple paragraphs of Percy and Rigel talking about him becoming a lawyer, because none of what they say is wrong, but it's also not really right. The legal profession has as much neapotism as politics, but unlike politics, really does hold merit as an ideal and strive for it. Even though most firms won't directly hire children of their partners, the use of conversational interviews still selects for people from upper-class backgrounds (hard to talk about hobbies you can't afford). People don't always listen to you, and when they give you instructions you often have to obey even if it's contrary to your recommendations. Your success is founded on having a great articling principal, mentors, and colleagues, as much as it is on your own work. Lawyers make a huge range of incomes, from very little to quite a lot, and as a criminal defence lawyer, Percy isn't likely to earn that much (it'll be more than enough, but he'll never earn as much as he would have had he gone to the Ministry). And in terms of respect, criminal defence lawyers have to learn to accept public disrespect, in exchange for the respect of their peers. 
> 
> It's complicated, but there is still something so wonderful about belonging to a profession that is so flawed, and yet strives so hard to be better.


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